The ability to ride the rollercoaster of life and still value yourself, whatever happens. Resilience is lived in how we respond to difficult moments.
Noticing what shows up in the body, the feelings, and the stories we build from them. Once we see the story, we can choose how we respond, and we can rewrite it.
We rarely stop to consider what we are genuinely good at. When we connect with our strengths and use them deliberately, we become more comfortable and more authentic.
When things get difficult, this is how we regain stability, reset our internal systems, and come back into the present.
When we understand what we stand for, our why, it becomes easier to take action and move towards the person we want to be, even when it is hard.
Seeing the world from another personâs perspective, with empathy and without judgement. It extends inward too. We all need permission to be vulnerable, and sometimes we all need help.
Making sure there is room to learn and grow from what we do. Repeating the same actions without asking questions leaves little space for meaningful change.
Acknowledging who we are, warts and all, while knowing we can grow and change when we are purposeful about
Some people arrive at sports psychology through textbooks. Misia helped write them. For more than thirty years she has been at the heart of how the discipline grew in the UK, as a founding member of the British Olympic Association Psychology Advisory Group and a senior consultant to The FA since 2002. She was the first sport psychologist The FA ever appointed to support a national team, becoming the England Lionessesâ first sports psychologist and spending six years with the squad, walking with them through a World Cup and a European Championship.
Her roots are in gymnastics, where she coached at international level and represented her country at World and European Championships. It was there she first understood what elite sport asks of a human being, and what it can take from one. Her research into the emotional abuse of elite child athletes, published in 2004, was among the first of its kind anywhere. It opened a conversation the sporting world had avoided for decades, and when gymnastics finally faced its reckoning years later, Misia was the one facilitating the first group therapy sessions for survivors.
At Brunel University London she has shaped how the next generation of sport psychologists are trained. In the professional game she has built psychology programmes at the QPR Academy and Wycombe Wanderers, where her work with every age group was recognised as the biggest programme of its kind in Europe. Her research with the Professional Footballersâ Association changed how the game understands long-term injury, revealing that recovery is as much psychological as it is physical.
Since meeting Nick Rothwell in 2020, Misia has been working closely with a group of ice hockey players, immersing herself in the sport and learning how it shapes the people who play it. Through years of weekly conversations she has come to understand the pressures carried by those still active, those in transition, and those who have left the game behind. That depth of understanding, combined with a lifetime spent alongside athletes at every level, makes her perfectly placed to create a programme designed for the people of ice hockey.Out of all of it, the coaching, the research, the trauma work, and the years spent listening to hockey players, came Tough Through Tender.